The Voyage by Murray Bail Page A

to say next. Elisabeth turned, “I don’t think she looks hysterical either. A perfectly well-adjusted woman.” Delage was watching the Bertolt Brecht lookalike who had stopped in mid-sentence, a tall man with an anxious look had hurried in from the side and taken his elbow to tell him, Delage learned later, his house near Ottakring had caught fire and was still ablaze; without another word, the critic hurriedly left. “He’s going, and I was keen to see him. I had something I wantedto talk about.” Again, Delage felt to one side of whatever was happening, an opportunity was there but moved away from him. Elisabeth stood up. “I’m looking for my mother. I’m coming right back.”

    Delage never went into Athens to see for himself how the most learned, graceful and philosophical city had become the ugliest, crassest, most disgraceful of cities, all sense of proportion trashed, along with imparted wisdom; what a people to allow it. At least Port Said, a few days later, where he had a haircut on the footpath while the ship unloaded European textbooks, electronics, medical instruments to take on Egyptian brass lamps, dates, cotton tea towels, there were no disappointments, it was all matter-of-fact, wide open in the brown heat, a straightforward mess with no reminders of previous grandeur, figures lay asleep on benches, the eucalyptus tree, dreamy slow-motion movement, the figures in long costume or else wearing cheap shirts, all of which left him in a stationary position, a person in a false situation, he distinctly felt. “Do you think there’s a piano here—anywhere? I don’t think so.” In hot countries, the weather favors drums and single-string instruments, and their repetitious melancholy, a grand piano would require tuning every other day. They were in a park, Elisabeth seated beside him. The other passengers went off in different directions, their alertness to novel sights gave the impression they had more energy than the locals, an optical illusion, most likely. Delage was happy to remain seated in the park with Elisabeth, a small crowd of men stood around watching. It was one thing to sit down at meals with virtualstrangers and make polite conversation, quite another to step off the ship and join them sightseeing. There is always a leader who attracts the timid, the conventional, it is how the European political and piano world has operated for centuries, to its detriment, Delage was looking down at his shoes and up at the young men looking at him, the majority fall into line behind the most established name in pianos, the least progressive piano, too afraid to take another path, as it is in all aspects of the world. “There I was, I experienced it firsthand. And I’m not impressed,” he said to her. The two weeks spent in Vienna had passed quickly. Elisabeth’s father told Delage from behind his ornate desk that his life up to sixty-five had passed slowly, but now approaching old age it began passing quickly. “Something for you to look forward to, perhaps,” with the faintest smile. Seated in the shade on a stone bench (so this is Port Said?), hemmed in by flat-roofed concrete buildings, people nearby slow-moving, watchful, he felt the opportunities for his Australian-made piano dissolving as Europe receded. There was no sign of Europe from where he was sitting. From the downtrodden park in Egypt, it didn’t exist, he could have been somewhere in outer space, Elisabeth seated beside him, providing a noticeable presence of loyalty, that was something; already he had difficulty remembering Vienna and its traffic, its heavy circles of architecture. It goes without saying they would stick their noses up in the air at an intruder, a concert grand made in a hopeless backward place, Australia. “Probably the wrong thing to do, going to Vienna. It had to be done, but I went too early—I’d say by about two years,” hewas saying, more or less to himself. “An expensive mistake, a fiasco, it achieved